I'm really looking forward to next Tuesday's meeting in London of the Authenticity Works group - convened with an informal and creative touch by John Moore - despite being put on the spot to get conversations going around community engagement processes.
This is only the third meeting of people from marketing, PR, coaching, facilitation and various sorts of consultancy who want to do stuff that rings true, practices what it preaches, has some coherent sets of values - and is fun and rewarding too. The positive face of anti-spin. Well, that's my interpretation. We all have our own, and the interest will, I think, be in discovering what authenticity means to people coming from different personal and professional places.
I missed the second meeting, and tentatively suggested to John that sometime in the future the group might want to focus discussions around some specific challenges. Apparent that was already on the agenda - and I had put myself first in line.
I see this as an opportunity to confess some of one's inauthentic behaviours of the past, gain group sympathy and support for the dilemmas one faces, and hopefully pick up some ideas for better ways of doing things.
Anyway, no sooner had I given John a few notes than I'm billed as reviewing my "experience as a process planner and facilitator for public sector clients on community engagement programmes. The challenges he deals with include:
- the (tendered) brief usually needs to be challenged
- there is seldom one client - usually a partnership of agencies
- effective engagement requires commitment of those agencies, whose cultures are not always sympathetic to wider participation
- the agencies may be unprepared to deal with the results of engagement, and to deliver effectively
- good people in the institutions are trapped in systems and procedures
- wider publics are now getting rightly cynical about participation processes
- but if you don't try and do some of these jobs, other people will do it anyway (worse of course)"
My colleague Drew Mackie put it all rather well a few years back in an article Dancing while standing still. Not much has changed. My 10-year-old Guide to Effective Participation is available in full here. Looks a bit idealistic now...and it is a little painful to check out how far I have managed to do the things I recommended. I hope to find fresh heart and new inspiration next week. Details of the delightful Islington pub that we meet in on John's blog.
More here about engagement on this blog
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